


Sweet It Was But Bitter It Be

by katajainen



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Braids, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-compliant angst, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Laying out (funeral customs), M/M, Moria, Post-Battle of Five Armies, Violent Death, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-01
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-03 15:14:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8718736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katajainen/pseuds/katajainen
Summary: Fíli had not promised to come back to him; they both had known any such pledge would have been false.Now there is nothing for Ori to do but to give Fíli this final service. And, somehow, go on.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at [my tumblr](https://katajainen.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Please mind the tags: canon-compliant (including character death), so sad as fuck.
> 
> And part of the fic deals with what comes between death and the burial (an actual dead body described, but not in too graphical detail). Thought I should mention, since it might squick out some.

When you die, you are laid out by your kin. Ori knows this (after all, had he not helped his brothers lay out their mother, years past now). He knows also that Thorin and the princes have blood-kin among the surviving members of the Company. Óin might be too busy aiding the living, and Dwalin bed-ridden himself (Ori had heard said he might lose the leg), but they both have a brother. And Dáin Ironfoot is cousin to the late King.

That nonewithstanding, there’s no voice of protest when Ori steps forward and says he would do this final service for Fíli. Some from the Iron Hills look askance, as they would. There is nothing there for them to see, no simple proof of braids and beads. But the outsiders could go on looking as much as they willed. Thorin had not been their king, and Fíli not their prince. The Company would set them out for their return to the stone, and Ori is of the Company. And the Company knows.

So it is Ori who pries armour and clothes off cold stiff limbs and separates what is hopelessly rent and stained and ruined from what might still be salvageable. (Which is, he thinks, much of a same thing that Óin does at the healing tents, only with those still breathing.)

It is Ori who washes off dried blood and worse. The warrior’s ink stands out too sharp, black and dark Durin blue, on skin paler than life stained red-purple by the touch of decay.

_Ori had traced each every line with his fingertips, front and back and sides. It was very early on that he learned that Fíli was ticklish. Fíli had said Ori should get his own, warrior’s ink after the quest was done. He won’t, not now or ever. He will get mourning marks._

He should feel something, he thinks, touching Fíli like this for the last time. But this is not Fíli under his hands, this cold broken shell, this stranger wearing his lover’s ink. His Fíli was breath and laughter, a fiddle singing of sorrow and joy in equal measure, strong arms holding him close – and that is no more. When Ori washes the blood off, the wounds are left gaping and dry until he binds them over for appearance’s sake.

The borrowed clothes are clean but plain. It makes no matter; there is a hoard of flamboyant armour to go over them, enough to last a hundred such burials. Ori decks the stranger in Fíli’s skin under gold-plated steel polished to high shine, but lets him keep the prince’s twin swords – after all, they will be burying Orcrist with Thorin. The blades are clean now, but notched and scraped to testify how fiercely they had been wielded.

Ori rests his hands on the hilts and pauses. He didn’t see it himself, but what he heard tell was that Fíli had been the last one standing after his brother and the King had fallen. He hadn’t promised to come back to Ori. They had both known any such pledge would have been false. But Ori has seen and bound and covered in gilt the ruin that had been a knee, the broken fingers, the sickening rents where his chest had been run through, not only once but twice. He has wiped Fíli’s face and neck clean where he had coughed up blood.

The small cold room sways before his eyes, the light flickers and dims, and Ori grips the edge of the bier with both hands, the stone cold under his fingers. There’s no air left in is chest for him to cry out.

He tells himself he can see this through. This is what is left for him to do. The only thing he can do.

He braids the golden mane, clean now of matted blood and dirt, into family braids, slips in the clasp that’s a twin to the one Kíli wears. He wants. His fingers itch to place a braid of his own next to the Durin ones, but he cannot and he will not. It’s no use wishing he had done it before, it’s no use wanting to do it now.

Ori looks down on his handiwork, this resplendent cold stranger in gold and steel, this prince of Durin’s line who is now further away from him than the highest peak of Zirakzigil is from the darkest depths of Khazad-dûm. The vision dims and wavers and he realizes the tears are coming at last.

Without thinking he takes a hank of his own hair, braids it good and tight and ties both ends off with a length of purple ribbon. There would be any number of precious hair beads that he could claim as part of his fourteenth share, but Fíli had loved him with nothing but purple ribbons in his hair.

With infinite care he cuts the braid off at the root. He secures the ends to one another, makes a full circle of something with a beginning and an end. This he slips into Fíli’s hand, between the cold skin and engraved gauntlet hiding the twisted useless fingers that would never heal. No-one but him knows what he left Fíli with. No-one but him knows what he has promised.

Ori walks through the ceremonies as if wearing someone else’s skin. At the wake he grimly and deliberately drinks himself senseless. The next day, as soon as his hands stop shaking, he braids himself craft-wed.

No-one but the Company looks askance. But no-one, not even his brothers, says a word.

Years pass. There’s a hole in his chest that aches like a missing limb, but he has learned to breathe past it, even if each morning he wakes up is the briefest of disappointments.

His reasons for going to Khazad-dûm with Balin are, he thinks, probably the same Balin has for going at all. Neither of them has a wish to die old and tottering in their beds. (Ori has seen the price of a kingdom paid in full. If there might be another realm bought with his own coin, he would pay gladly.)

It would be an end worthy of a song, if there were anyone left alive to sing of it. _The end comes,_ Ori writes, _drums, drums in the deep._ The doors are already giving way when he scrawls the last hasty _they are coming_ and slams the book down on Balin’s tomb, open, that the wet ink will not smear, and hefts his hammer.

‘Let them come!’ he hears someone shout and his own throat is raw with the force of it.

The end is a chaos of flashing steel and screeching orcs – too many of them, enough to fill the chamber of Mazarbul with their own dead and clamber over them. It is pain as he falls, rolls over and something heavy – a mace, a club, a hammer – crushes him to the floor. His vision goes white for a moment, and when he can see again his legs are an unmoving, unfeeling weight underneath him. Left for dead he drags himself across the floor. The book topples into his lap when he reaches for it, and he clutches it tight against his chest when every breath hurts a bit more than the last. They will not get our words, Ori thinks, not our story written down. They will have it over my dead body – and then he laughs at the truth of it, even if it hurts enough to bring tears to his eyes. He must have cracked a rib, he thinks as he tastes blood with the laughter and tears.

He closes his eyes and hears the clamour of steel and flesh and wonders if this is what death felt like to Fíli, but the world falls away before he can quite finish the thought.

It is dark, first. Then warm and golden and unfathomably strange and familiar at once. For what else can it be when he hears a voice silenced a lifetime past call him ‘my love’?

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't come up with "craft-wed". (I think it might have been Thorinsmut or Blue_Sparkle, but correct me if I'm wrong.)
> 
> And also. Gods, this one was a bastard to rate. Finally thought better safe than sorry.


End file.
